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March 2009
The Archives
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03.31.09Talk About The PassionYour correspondent went through much of his adult life under the impression that visual art – particulary the conceptual kind – was created for brainier folk than he. Too many unfathomable interactive video installations make a body feel like they need a degree in post-everything theory in order to appreciate fuzzy Super 8 loops of someone eating a nectarine through a gas mask. But three times over the past month I found myself voluntarily visiting the Irish Museum Of Modern Art in Kilmainham. The old Royal Hospital and gardens are a fine place to spend any spring morning (and the downstairs ...
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03.28.09Visions of YouBlue notes, Coptic gospel and a bassline you could walk to the moon on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGqJ3PFRR_8
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03.24.09In Dreams…Stuart Evers says nice things about J the R's dream sequences in today's Guardian Books Blog. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/mar/23/fiction-dream-sequences
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03.23.09Everything That Rises…Joyce Carol Oates on the life and work of Flannery O'Connor, through the prism of Brad Gooch's new biography. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22532
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03.23.09Ohfrancis reviewEva Plazewska's review of J the R for www.ohfrancis.com As a writer for Hot Press magazine and regular contributor to RTE’s The View, Peter Murphy is—no doubt—a man about town on the Dublin scene. Thankfully then, his first novel, John the Revelator, takes you far from this milieu and drops you in some sort of rural Gothic Wexford. Joining John and his mother Lily on Ballo Strand, we enter a story rooted tight in place but adrift in the past fifty years of Irish small-town life. You will go strawberry picking, to the amusements, to the disco. And all the ...
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03.19.09And speaking of the sound and the fury…"I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better." – William Faulkner
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03.19.09How to sing the shit out of a song ctd…We are not worthy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_nwAkOGL78
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03.19.09The Sound and the FuryYour starter for ten: how do Mogwai, five unassuming blokes from Glasgow, produce such an epic, expansive, end-times sound roughly halfway between Sonic Youth and Sergio Leone? “I don’t know!” laughs multi-instrumentalist founder member Stuart Braithwaite, on the phone from Orleans in France. “ It’s quite strange, I don’t think the music reflects us particularly as people, because it’s quite sombre, and we’re not at all like that. It’s something subconscious. I think some of our music sounds Scottish, it has a real pentatonic sadness about it. “But I think the city of Glasgow has affected us more culturally, being in ...
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03.14.09Shark TalesJoe Gideon & the Shark Harum Scarum (Bella Union) An extraordinary debut arrives just as spring begins to bite. Former members of Bikini Atoll, Joe Gideon and his sister Viva generate a guttural electric blues (‘Harum Scarum’, ‘Johan Was A Painter And An Arsonist’, ‘DOL’), but when they cast aside the Cramps/Blues Explosion/Gallon Drunk inclinations and embrace an unlikely kind of soul music, the duo really soar. The album’s four or five talking blues story-songs, rendered in Gideon’s rough, compelling and somewhat Antipodean tones, are nothing less than stellar. Exhibit A, the driving vision-quest monologue ‘Civilization’, in which the protagonist leaves the flat ...
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03.14.09This is Radio ClashThe first edition of John Kelly's Radio Clash will be repeated on RTE Radio 2XFM this evening at 7pm. Check out the playlist: Asie Payton/Go Gittas Camp – Ooh Baby Tom Waits – Big In Japan The Clash – Magnificent 7 BushTetras – You Can’t Be Funky 23 Skidoo – Coup LKJ – Want Fi Goh Rave In Crowd – mango Walk Lee Perry & The Upsetters – Grumblin’ Dub Junior Murvin – Roots Train Big Audio Dynamite – E-Mc2 PIL – This Is Not A Love Song Stooges – I wanna Be Your Dog Velvet Underground – I’m Waiting For The man Vince Taylor – Brand New Cadillac Lloyd Price – Stagger lee